Peterson Zah

It's one of those things when you're growing up and it seems like so
far away, but as I go back nowadays, I would say we were about maybe eight
miles from the trading post. It was in a northeasterly direction,
about eight miles. So if we had to walk, maybe it took us a little
less than an hour to get there, on horseback maybe thirty minutes.
And in a wagon, maybe about an hour. But the roads were bad, and
so… we kind of made it the event of the day to go to the trading post.

***

My responsibility as a young boy was one of always helping out the family.
My grandparents and my own parents would assign a task to me, and my duty
was to make sure that those were carried out from day to day. For
example, my parents were responsible for letting the sheep out in the
morning. And then while that sheep corral was being opened, I was
always having my breakfast. Once they got two, three miles up the
canyon, then it was my job to follow the sheep. No questions asked,
no argument--that was your duty. And the other thing was, that when
you came home, there was always wood to be chopped, wood to be gathered…
You don't go to bed without any wood inside the hogan, for example.
You always had to have that, because it gets cold--particularly in the
wintertime. The animals had to go out and graze, and they had to
be tended to from day to day. So that was a duty that was an ongoing
duty all the time. It was one of those things where you just had
to learn how to be responsible by doing, and very little talking about
things. But you just worked hard during the day, even as a young
kid…

The water for the animals we either relied on the rain--there were a
couple of dams, one maybe three or four miles up the road in one direction,
and maybe one further out, two or three miles going the other direction.
And so we always took the sheep there for water. If for some reason
we were unable to do that, or if there was not enough water there for
the animals, then down the canyon maybe four or five miles away, there
was a windmill. I remember the water that came from there was not
muddy, as opposed to the dam water. So the windmill water was a
lot cleaner, but it required taking the sheep down the canyon, then bringing
them back up. And if it's five miles away, that's ten miles.
So on occasion, we took our sheep down there. Of course we always
had the option of going on horseback to do that. And I think on
many occasions we used the horses to herd the sheep to the water.

Drinking water, we had a spring at the first camp there. We had
a spring where that spring was good to the family. It was always
producing good drinking water. We kind of fenced it up so that the
sheep and animals wouldn't go there. And it was preserved for family
use. That well [i.e., spring] was something that we utilized for
many, many years. And I remember we used to have to take a bucket,
a gallon- or two-gallon bucket, and going over there daily to get the
water, both to my grandparents and to our camp. And that was a task
that my father mainly did, because I guess he wanted to make sure that
the water wasn't contaminated or anything like that. Sometimes on
occasion I would take a gallon jug, and I would just follow him, and he
would fill the gallon jug, and my job was to put it on my back and take
it home. And my father always had two buckets with him. That
was how we got our drinking water.

***

My grandfather was a very interesting man. His name was Guy Malteen
[phonetic spelling]. He was a carpenter, I guess, by trade.
He went to school and learned how to do carpentry work. He was also
a coal miner in Keams Canyon. Into the canyon and by the mountain
they have coal that comes right out of the rocks there. And the
Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Keams Canyon Agency decided that they
should employ some people--maybe three or four people--and they put a
great big hole into the mountain. And then they had a railroad that
they placed in there. And then they had a mule, I remember.
And my grandfather always used to drive the mule into the mine.
And then sometimes I would sit there and just watch the men going into
the coal mine. Maybe I would go from our sheep camp with one or
two other boys who were a little older than I, and we would just sit there
against the mountain, and we would see the men going into the mine.
And then maybe a couple hours later, the mule would come back with the
wagon just full of coal. Then they would load it onto the truck.
Then the truck would take it up to the school, the local school, and probably
to the local BIA headquarters there, and at the powerhouse they burned
it all day. And that's what was keeping those houses and offices
warm.

So my grandfather, because he had that job, meant that he had to ride
his horse between Keams Canyon over to our camp, eight miles down the
road. Sometimes he would ride that distance every day, but on occasion
he would ride his horse in, but stayed at Keams Canyon in a little hut,
a little stone and brick building. He would stay there, and then
come back the following evening. So he may leave, let's say, Monday
morning really, really early, like four a.m. in the morning, five a.m.
in the morning, and then he would come back Tuesday night, instead of
Monday. That way, he only rode in maybe three days out of a week.
And so he had his camp there.

He may have one or two other grandchildren during the summer months when
school was out, older boys, with him. But mainly, I was the main
one that was always around there with him.

My grandmother and my grandfather had a house--not a hogan, a house--because
my grandfather was a carpenter, and he managed to build his own house.
And so I sensed right at an early age that he was living a little different
than most Navajo families in that area. In other words, inside he
had a table and he had some chairs. But everything that was in that
house was handmade, he built it himself. And so my grandfather was
very handy with his hands. And he was considered a good individual
to have him build your house.

My mother and father, we had a hogan. We had a hogan maybe about
fifty to seventy-five yards away from each other. In between was
the corral. And that was a camp to me, because we had two families.
And then on occasion, my grandfather's kids, one or two of them, may come
back, and so they built a hogan. During the summer months they would
come back to Keams Canyon, Low Mountain area, and they would stay there.

***

My father later on also started working at the mine. And my father
was one of these individuals where he, and maybe one or two other people
in the community, were the only ones that had the ability to speak English.
And so the Navajo people gave my father a name. His Navajo name
was Ólta'í yázhí,"the short person with education," or "the schooled short
person." And the reason why they gave him that name was he had the
ability to write, and had the ability to speak the English language.

My grandfather was also a good English speaker--perfect English speaker--because
during his young days he used to work in White Mountain Apache.
He worked with the San Carlos Apaches, and he was down here in Phoenix.
He was all over the place, and spoke very eloquently in English.
His brother was Scott Preston, who was the vice-chairman of the tribe
at the time. And I remember Scott Preston used to come over and
visit his brother, and they used to build sweat baths, start a sweat bath
going, and I used to go over and participate with them. And all
day they would just talk politics. As a little boy, I was there
to listen. Of course my interest always was politics, and so I used
to love to listen to Scott Preston, what was going on in Window Rock with
tribal politics and all of that. It was interesting times.

Early on, my father went into the service, maybe around 1937, 1938, 1939.
He was training and preparing to become one of the Navajo Nation code
talkers when the war was over. When he came back, he came back to
the family as an alcoholic. He liked his booze, and we could never
get him away from that. But he didn't drink all the time.
He was one of these, I guess, individuals that drank very heavily for
a short period of time, and then left it alone for the next couple of
months or so.

He had a great sense of responsibility towards his people. For
example, he would go to the trading posts and he would get mail, an envelope
like this, because he knew all of these people whose name was on there.
Mary Yazzie. He would look at it and say, "Mary Yazzie is our neighbor,
seven miles up the road." So he would get all of that, and then
he would ride his horse to Mary Yazzie's house, and then he would deliver
the mail to Mary Yazzie. Well, Mary Yazzie can't read or write, so
then he would give it to Mary, and then Mary Yazzie would open...
He always had them open the letter, and then they gave him the letter
and he would read it to them in Navajo. And he would interpret from
English right into Navajo words. And nine times out of ten, those
Navajo ladies would say, "We want you to write back to this person for
us." And so my dad would sit there and the ladies would tell him
what to say. And so he would write back to the people.

Most of these letters that I remember as a young boy were letters that
came from young men that were in the service during the war. And
I remember him reading to his own brothers and sisters what kind of war
was going on, what happened at night, and the Japanese, what they looked
like, and how they were so lucky, and all of that. And the letters
would say something like, "I don't know if I'll return home, but I'm just
telling you the way life is here when you're in the service." They
would describe the food that they would eat, and the long walks that they
had to take, and how they got thirsty, let's say, on one trip, and one
of their buddies would get killed. That kind of some horrible war
stories that they would write about. And I remember some elderly
Navajo women would cry as my father would read the letters to them.
And then my dad would say, "Let's go to another camp to deliver another
letter." So I would sit on the back of the horse. We had one
horse, so I would just sit in back of him, and then he would deliver the
mail to the next person. The same thing would happen. And
I remember a lot of times when the people who are in the war, they will
not put their address down, and the ladies want to write back, but there's
nobody to write back, so they know that the letter came from their son.
So my dad would just say, "We'll wait for the next letter. Maybe
they'll have a return address. That way I can write back to them
for you."

Now, my dad didn't get a cent for that. And I don't think he even
wished to be paid for that. That was his sense of service, his sense
of duty. And he used to say that "I have the ability to read, and
I have the ability to talk English. That's why I went to school.
And these other people didn't go to school and they can't read or write
English. So I have a duty to them." And he used to tell me,
"When you go to school, you also have a duty to those people." And
I guess that's where I got my sense of dedication, the urgency to serve,
because of what he was doing. And the amazing thing was, we would
be hungry, but he never got paid for all of that. And I think that's
why they gave him that name, Ólta'í yázhí, is that he was a schooled person
that can be their ears and eyes and their mouth.